I ๐Ÿ’œ Wasting Ink โ†’ Diaries โ†’ These Walking Dreams โ†’ Day 123 (August 13, 2017)

Upper Rawan, Hokkaido โ†’ ๐Ÿ“ Lake Onnetล โ†’ ๐ŸŒ‹ Mount Meakan โ†’ โ™จ๏ธ Lake Akan Hot Spring, Hokkaido

Map of Hokkaido with authorโ€™s route from Upper Rawan across Mount Meakan to Lake Akan Hot Spring highlighted. ๐Ÿ—บ Open map in GaiaGPS โ†’

A forest of birch and fir.

A moss-covered, fallen trunk in a forest.

The white trunk of a birch with its bark peeling heavily.

Lichen on the trunk of a tree with deep red bark.

Tiny fungi growing on a black tree trunk.

Gabor in a forest of stone pine, with a view of forested hills behind him. ๐Ÿ“ Mount Meakan, Hokkaido

Gabor ascends an orange-brown scree slope.

Gabor kneels at the edge of a crater, looking into a foggy void.

Panorama of a woman in pink trousers and a grey cardigan photographing the volcanic crater.

A circular, turquoise lake in the crater.

The author holds in his left hand four pieces of M&Mโ€™s, which are almost the same color as the volcanic scree.

Colorful volcanic scree on the ground.

The scree forms a circular pattern in which the orange and red rocks are separate. ๐Ÿ“ Mount Meakan, Hokkaido

The crater groaned and hissed with great columns of steam, a window into the early days of the planet, and the ground turned into a many-hued moonscape above the treeline. Volcanoes stretched in an unbroken arc towards the snow peaks of Kamchatka. We walked on, into a pure white, mineral land, ecstatic with wonder. A cold fog enveloped us, and condensed on the down of our ears as if on desert flowers at dawn. The last roads of Japan lay ahead. We swam in the waist-high bamboo grass, sang songs to alert the bears, shivered in the cold rain.

Flowers with similar fine hairs also covered in dew.

Closeup of the fine hairs on Gaborโ€™s ears covered in dew.

A landscape of bare white pebbles in the fog. ๐Ÿ“ Mount Meakan, Hokkaido

These Walking Dreams is a visual field diary of a 4,300-kilometer walk from one end of Japan to the other, in the spring and summer of 2017.

About Diaries Mailingย List Shikoku Shop Walks